Bankloch

BNPL (short for " Buy Now Pay Later ") is a hot topic in the Credit space. The recent funding round of Klarna (one of the most known BNPL players on the market) of $639 million at a valuation of $45,6 billion makes it Europe’s most valuable startup and shows that investors predict continuing exponential growth for this service. This anticipated growth is coming from an increased negative perception of consumers towards revolving credit lines, like credit cards. As a result consumers look for cheaper and more user-friendly and convenient alternatives. Especially the younger generation of millennials seems to be attracted by this offer, with 15 percent of them already uses BNPL today, i.e. 5 times more than older generations. Combine this with the continuous growth in e-commerce for which this type of credit is ideally suited and you can get a feeling why such an astronomical valuation could be justified. The result is an   exploding market of Fintechs   offering those promisin...

A sector which has been heavily disrupted in the last years is the   mobility sector . Following decades of "car being king", we have reached a saturation and mentality shift. People want to be more healthy and more ecological (sustainable) and also avoid losing precious time in traffic jams. As a result a whole eco-system of companies has been created to find solutions for this. This article tries to provide an overview of the   trends in this market , with a focus on the Belgian market. First of all when looking at mobility and the offers on the market it is important to make a distinction between   private and professional displacements . This last category can additionally be split up between the daily commute and professional displacements during working hours. When looking at private mobility (the so-called   B2C market ), the car remains an important pilar. Especially for families with (young) children it remains difficult to do everything without a car. Obvio...

At my current company Monizze, we issue social vouchers, like meal, eco and gift vouchers. These vouchers are consumed using a specific Monizze payment card via a physical terminal. As a result, I come into contact with card payments on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I am still far from being a card expert, but along the years I can say I have built up a good basic understanding of how a card payment happens. As I had to collect information from different sources to get this first good understanding, I thought it might be interesting to share my summary for "dummies" of how card payments work. First let us have a look at the card itself. A card is just a plastic carrier on which a design is printed. Afterwards a chip (an embedded microprocessor) is attached to the card, on which 1 or more applications can be deployed. A card with such a chip is often also called a   smart card or an EMV card , with EMV an abbreviation for " Europay MasterCard VISA ", which are the 3 ...

The term " Horeca " is an abbreviation of "Hotel", "Restaurant" and "Café". It represents a very diverse sector, i.e. from star-restaurants to catering and canteens to brasseries up to small, local cafes. A small country like Belgium counted end 2017 almost 60.000 horeca-enterprises (7% of all Belgian enterprises), thus showing the importance of this sector. Furthermore with a total revenue (also end 2017) of over 15 billion EUR and more than 75.000 people employed in this sector, it remains an important economical actor for the Belgian economy. It is undisputable that the Covid crisis has been a disaster for this sector. However, now that life gradually returns back to normal, it is likely that the trends which were already launched in the horeca sector before the crisis will be even enforced and accelerated. With new habits come new customer needs related to the horeca. Think about the company canteens. With more people working from home, this ...